Sunday, May 26, 2013

The medieval
Islamic philosopher Ibn Sina or Avicenna (c. 980 - 1037)
is one among that myriad of thinkers of genius unjustly neglected by
contemporary philosophers. Useful recent
studies of his thought include the updated edition of Lenn Goodman’s Avicenna
and Jon McGinnis’s Avicenna. More recent still is McGinnis’s essay “The
Ultimate Why Question: Avicenna on Why God is Absolutely Necessary” in John F.
Wippel, ed., The
Ultimate Why Question: Why Is There Anything at All Rather than Nothing
Whatsoever? Among the topics of
this essay is Avicenna’s version of the argument from contingency for the
existence of a divine Necessary Existent.
Let’s take a look.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Since therefore grace does not
destroy nature but perfects it, natural reason should minister to faith as the
natural bent of the will ministers to charity… Hence sacred doctrine makes use
also of the authority of philosophers in those questions in which they were
able to know the truth by natural reason…

Here’s one
way to think about the relationship between nature and grace, reason and faith,
philosophy and revelation. Natural
theology and natural law are like a skeleton, and the moral and theological
deliverances of divine revelation are like the flesh that hangs on the
skeleton. Just as neither skeleton alone
nor flesh alone give you a complete human being, neither do nature alone nor
grace alone give you the complete story about the human condition.

Friday, May 17, 2013

Returning to
my
series on the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind
and Cosmos, let’s look at the recent Commonweal magazine symposium on the book. The contributors are philosopher Gary
Gutting, biologist Kenneth Miller, and physicist Stephen Barr. I’ll remark on each contribution in turn.

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Commonweal magazine has published a symposium on
Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, to
which physicist Stephen Barr, biologist Kenneth Miller, and philosopher Gary
Gutting have contributed. It’s temporarily
available for free on the Commonwealwebsite,
here.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Natural law
theory holds that a large and substantive body of moral knowledge can be had
apart from divine revelation. Natural theology
holds that a large and substantive body of theological knowledge can be had apart
from divine revelation. Yet both secular
and religious critics of natural law theory and natural theology sometimes accuse
them of smuggling in the deliverances of revelation. For example, theologian David Bentley Hart,
in his recent attacks on natural law theory (to which I responded here,
here, and here),
seemed to take the view that natural law arguments implicitly presuppose
revealed or supernatural truths. Secular
critics routinely accuse natural law theorists of rationalizing conclusions that
they would never have arrived at if not for the teachings of the Bible or the
Church. Critics of the Scholastic
tradition in philosophy sometimes accuse it of constructing metaphysical
notions ad hoc, for the sake of advancing
theological claims. (My friend Bill
Vallicella has
made this complaint vis-à-vis the Scholastic notion of suppositum.) In every case
the objection is that if an idea has an origin in a purported source of divine
revelation, its status as a purely philosophical thesis or argument is ipso facto suspect.

One of the problems
with such objections is that they overlook the distinction between what Hans
Reichenbach called the “context of discovery” and the “context of
justification” -- a distinction he applied within the philosophy of science,
but which has application in other contexts too.

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

No one
denies that conspiracies exist. They
occur every time two thugs decide to rob a liquor store together. When people dismiss “conspiracy theories,”
what they are dismissing is not the idea that bad people conspire, or that they
do so in secret, or that these bad people are sometimes government
officials. Typically, what they are
critical of is the sort of theory that postulates a conspiracy so overarching that the theory tends
implicitly to undermine its own epistemological foundations, precisely by
undermining the possibility of any sociopolitical knowledge at all -- something
analogous to Cartesian skepticism in the sociopolitical context.

Saturday, May 4, 2013

I’m afraid
I’m very much a latecomer to the pretentious commentary party vis-à-vis Ridley
Scott’s Prometheus, since I only saw
the flick after it came out on Blu-ray and even then have been too preoccupied
with other things of late to comment.
But it’s better than the reviews led me to believe, and worth a
philosophical blog post. Plus, I need to
do something to keep this site from
becoming The Official Thomas
Nagel and David
Bentley Hart Commentary Page and Message Boards.

About Me

I am a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. I teach philosophy at Pasadena City College. My primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. I also write on politics, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective.